The Mandil family escaped deportation thanks to a Christmas photo
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Gavra Mandil was born in 1936 in Belgrade, then in Yugoslavia. His father Moshe and his maternal grandfather both worked as professional photographers. 2/n In order not to create competition between them, Gavra's parents decide to move to Novi Sad, giving everyone the opportunity to flourish in their profession. In 1938, Gavra's sister, Irena-Rina (Beba) was born. The family found its feet in its adopted city.

Bogdanovka - The Holocaust’s forgotten massacre
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December 21, 1941: The Holocaust’s biggest mass shooting claimed 54,000 lives near a village in modern Ukraine — yet few have heard of it today. 2/n In December 1941, at a place called Bogdanovka in modern Ukraine, the largest shooting massacre of the Holocaust took place. Remarkably, it is an event barely known about in the English-speaking world. Bogdanovka, which today lies in Ukraine close to the River Bug,

The #Righteous amongst us
Johanna Eck
"My Duty and Responsibility"
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Johanna Eck was a German war widow who, during World War II, sheltered four victims of Nazi persecution, including two Jews.
Johanna Eck’s husband was killed during World War I. One of his friends during the 2/n war was a German Jew named Jakob Guttman. When the Nazis began deporting and murdering Germany’s Jews, Jakob and his family were killed. One of his sons, Heinz, was able to escape and left on the streets. None of his Gentile acquaintances would risk their lives to shelter him

NOVOGRUDOK September 26, 1943
The most successful tunnel escape
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This is an extraordinary true yet little known Holocaust story of bravery and defiance. All in all 232 Jews got out, almost the entire population of the ghetto. 125 who went through the tunnel survived the escape 2/n The escape of the last remaining prisoners of the Novogrudok Ghetto in Belarus after 2 years of Nazi occupation took place on September 26, 1943. It was organized from the barracks of the closed-type ghetto through a 200-metre-long tunnel which the prisoners dug themselves.

30 November 1941: The Rumbula forest massacre
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German forces occupied Riga in early July 1941 after the invasion of the Soviet Union. In August, the Germans ordered the establishment of a ghetto in the city; this ghetto was sealed in October 1941, imprisoning some 30,000 Jews. 2/n In late November & early December 1941, the Germans announced they intended to settle the majority of ghetto inhabitants "further east." On November 30 & December 8-9, at least 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were shot by German SS & police units & their Latvian auxiliaries

Unbroken - The story of the Weber family
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Born and raised in Berlin, the seven Weber siblings miraculously survived the Holocaust and immigrated to the United States, the largest group of Jewish siblings known to remain unseparated. 2/n Alexander was a German traveling salesman who met Lina Banda in Hungary and fell in love with her. Alexander was Catholic, however, and Lina’s father was an Orthodox rabbi. So Alexander converted and the two married.

Love, It Was Not
(Liebe war es nie)
Documentary (2020)

The tragic love story of Helena Citron, a young Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz, and Austrian SS officer Franz Wunsch.

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In March 1942, Helena Citrónová was among the first thousand Jewish women who were transported
2/n from Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz. The dogs are barking and the guards are laughing as the beautiful Helena is undressed and shaved. The humiliations of the concentration camp only get worse as the weeks go by, until the SS officer Franz Wunsch hears her sing

July 1945
Mother finds son through a magazine photo
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He missed her so much at the camp. Back in Holland she was not there either. Now Sieg Maandag can embrace mother Keetje again, along with his sister Henneke. How they found each other again has everything to do with a photo. 2/n It's a photo that shocked many Americans. A little boy walking past corpses in Bergen-Belsen, his gaze averted. That boy was 7-year-old Sieg Maandag from Amsterdam.
The photo was taken shortly after the liberation of the camp. George Rodger made a photo report of the

🧵 1/n Robert Wagemans
was born in 1937 in Mannheim, Germany. His mother, Lotte, was arrested and briefly imprisoned for her activities as a Jehovah’s Witness. She gave birth shortly after her release. Due to the stress of imprisonment and insufficient medical care, 2/n Robert’s hip was injured during delivery, resulting in a permanent disability.
Robert was classified as disabled under the T4 Program. In 1943, Lotte was ordered to bring five-year old Robert for a medical examination to confirm his condition.

Theresienstadt - the Bialystok children
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On August 21, 1943, at the time of the annihilation of the Bialystok ghetto and the uprising there, the Gestapo demanded that 1,200 children ages 6-12 be gathered in order to transfer them, so they said, in an exchange deal to Palestine 2/n The transport of 1,200 children and 20 adults, traveled for 3 days by train and arrived on the 24 or 25 August at Theresienstadt.
At Theresienstadt the children were placed in a special camp Crete, which had been built outside the citadel.

The #Righteous during World War Two
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Rome: The Doctors At Fatebenefratelli Hospital Who Invented “Syndrome K”

In October 1943, a terrifying new disease suddenly appeared in Nazi-occupied Rome. Italian doctors claimed that the so-called “Syndrome K” was highly 2/n contagious and dangerous. But, in fact, it was all a ruse. A trio of doctors — Vittorio Sacerdoti, Giovanni Borromeo, and Adriano Ossicini — invented the disease to save Jews in Italy. When Jews came to Fatebenefratelli Hospital seeking a safe haven from the Nazis,

@AuschwitzMuseum 1/n Joseph Hakker a confectioner from Antwerp who wrote an elaborate testimony about his experiences detailed the registration procedure as follows: @AuschwitzMuseum 2/n “The registration office was under the command of the lawyer Dr Erich Krull. We sat on a bench where we received a number … A voice gave the order to put everything we had into a hat and said we could not keep anything. The walls were full of posters prompting us to hand in

#OTD 17 August 1944:

Drancy camp near Paris is liberated
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While the Allies landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the fighting for the liberation of French territory raged, Aloïs Brunner, the Nazi commander of the Drancy camp continued the “hunting of Jews”. 2/n About a thousand internees arrived at the Drancy camp in June, another thousand in July, including 250 children rounded up between 21 and 25 July 1944 in UGIF children's homes in the Paris region.

October 28, 1944
After the Red Cross visit of Theresienstadt, the Nazis decided to shoot a propaganda film.
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After the filming of “The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews,” in Theresienstadt, Director Kurt Gerron an all who participated in the filming were murdered in Auschwitz 2/n Kurt Gerron,*May 11, 1897, was a well-known artist. After his professional ban in Germany, he fled, was caught in Holland, and deported to Theresienstadt.
There, he was ordered to direct a propaganda film.

The #Righteous amongst us

Otto Weidt, The Blind Schindler
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Otto Weidt was born in 1883. During and after WWI, he was exonerated for health reasons. He was a convinced pacifist, and he suffered from a sight disease. He had to leave his job as an upholsterer, and he created a
2/n company with blind workers that produced brushes and brooms for the army. His employees were almost all blind, deaf or mute Jews whom a Jewish nursing home near Berlin. When the deportations began, fearless, he argued with Gestapo officials to save every single Jewish worker.

The #Righteous amongst us

Suzanne Spaak
'Something must be done'
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Suzanne Spaak lived in Paris with her husband Claude, a filmmaker, and their two children. Spaak, as the daughter of a famous Belgian banker, and sister-in-law of the Belgian foreign minister, was accustomed to 2/n a high standard of living. However, she found the German occupation of France intolerable and decided to join the Resistance.
In 1942, Spaak offered her services to the underground National Movement Against Racism. When she joined them, Spaak said, “Tell me what to do...

The #Righteous during World War II
Ona Šimaitė (6 Jan 1894 – 17 Jan 1970)
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Ona Šimaitė was a Lithuanian librarian who saved Jews, including many children, during the German occupation, and preserved literary works from the Vilna ghetto, before being arrested by the Gestapo.
2/n Born in Lithuania, but educated in Russia, in 1940, Christian woman named Ona Šimaitė moved to Vilnius (Vilna), long known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” There, Ona took a job as librarian at Vilnius University just as the Lithuanian people faced the looming German invasion

Leo Haas
was born into a Jewish family in Opava, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) on 15 April 1901. He studied in Karlsruhe and Berlin between 1919 and 1922, influenced by German expressionism and the works of Goya and Lautrec.
1/n 2/n From 1925–38 he worked in Vienna and Opava as an illustrator, painter and book-designer. He was arrested in 1939 for helping German communists to cross the border illegally and sent into forced labour.

'Children on the way to Auschwitz'

Survival in Auschwitz - SHOES
Primo Levi

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“Shoes function as a minor symbol of one’s status in the camp’s social hierarchy. Jewish prisoners are only allowed wooden clogs, which are painful and cause dangerous sores that can lead to lethal infections.
This reflects both the 2/n prisoners’ low station and the general disregard with which the Germans treat them. Contrarily, German officials and even German prisoners are given leather shoes, which are far more comfortable and less likely to cause dangerous infections. Near the end of the story, as the

Mira Rosenblatt, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
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Mira Rosenblatt’s childhood was like any other Jewish child. She was raised by a Polish mother and father, and had three brothers and two sisters.
2/n On September 1st, 1939, the Holocaust broke out in Europe. On September 4th, the Germans occupied Sosnowiec.
On August 12, 1942, all the Jews of Sosnowiec were ordered to report to the Stadium and Mira was ‘selected’ to be deported to a work camp.

The #Righteous amongst us

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FATHER BRUNO poses with five Jewish children he is hosting. Pictured from left: Henri Zwierszewski, George Michaelson, Father Bruno, Willy Michaelson, Henri Fuks and Willy Sandominski.

Date: 1942 - 1944. Location: Belgium 2/n Father Bruno Reynders (1903-1981), the savior of more than three hundred Jewish children under the Nazi occupation, was born in Ixelles. Back on the perilous route of this priest in whom Israel recognized a “Righteous of the Nations”. First there is the campaign of May 1940